In keeping with our annual tradition here at Bruce Clay, Inc., I’d like to share with you my forecast of the search climate in 2014. I've analyzed upcoming technologies and user behavior through the lens of search marketing since 1996, and in my eighth annual predictions I explain why I expect to see the jobs of SEOs and users’ online behavior change in the following ways:

Google will introduce enhanced features to local, or Places, results that businesses can buy, much like exists for PPC, or coupons with listings.

Voice search will pass 30% of all queries across all devices, and searches done on mobile devices will exceed searches done on desktops.

In its battle against spam, Google will broaden its net by penalizing newly defined types of spam, including negative SEO, and further lowering its tolerance for spam we’re familiar with, such as low-quality links.

Back to Basics10 Reasons You Should Use Google Trends for More Than Just Keyword ResearchAuthor: Chelsea Adams

You’ve heard of Google Trends. It’s that search query “zeitgeist” that Google launched in late 2012 to tell you how interest in the word “twerk” hit an all-time high in August 2013. But do you know that Google Trends is not just another keyword research tool? Where traditional keyword research tools are focused on delivering exact-match volume, Google Trends was built to generate visual, dynamic insights that paint a portrait of the life of a keyword phrase — past, present, and potentially future. Learn more about how:

On Dec. 30, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt shared his outlook for 2014 on Bloomberg TV’s “Ask a Billionaire.” Schmidt, a Ph.D. and No. 49 on The Forbes 400, has been with Google since 2001. From his unique position as a leader in technology and business, Schmidt offered his (albeit conservative) predictions on 2014’s biggest change, disruptor and disruption. Schmidt confesses his biggest mistake at Google and shares Google’s plans for growth in 2014. Schmidt revealed:

“The biggest change for consumers is going to be that everyone’s going to have a smartphone … The trend has been that mobile is winning — it’s now won. There are more tablets and phones being sold than personal computers — people are moving to this new architecture very fast.”

“The biggest disruptor that we’re sure about is the arrival of big data and machine intelligence everywhere — so the ability to find people, to talk specifically to them, to judge them, to rank what they're doing, to decide what to do with your products, changes every business globally.”

“The biggest disruption that we don’t really know what's going to happen is probably in the genetics area. The ability to have personal genetics records and the ability to start gathering all of the gene sequencing into places will yield discoveries in cancer treatment and diagnostics over the next year that that are unfathomably important.”

“At Google the biggest mistake that I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon — not a mistake we're going to make again ... but we should have been in that area, and I take responsibility for that.”

“Google is very much investing, we’re hiring globally, we see strong growth all around the world with the arrival of the Internet everywhere … Google benefits from transitions from traditional industries and shockingly even when things are tough in a country, because we have ROI-based advertising — it's smarter to move your advertising from others to Google, so we win no matter whether the industries are in good shape or not, because people need our services.”

Education Matters

Internet marketers, how do you stay on top of the ever-changing search industry? Keeping informed of the latest news and figuring out how to adapt your strategies is a challenge. What’s the best way? Many marketers agree: by attending industry conferences and trainings!

Conferences such as SMX, PubCon and many more showcase the top speakers and trainers. Attendees can hear first-hand breaking news from the likes of Amit Singhal (Google), Duane Forrester (Bing) and Matt McGee (Search Engine Land). In workshops and seminars, you can learn the latest best practices and strategies from recognized industry leaders, such as Bruce Clay’sOne-Day SEO Workshop coming to SMX West in San Jose, CA.

Moz founder Rand Fishkin officially stepped down as the CEO of Moz and handed the company reins to Sarah Bird, the new president and COO. Fishkin will remain at Moz as an individual contributor, blogger, product architect and, officially, as "The Wizard of Moz."

Shindigs

The following is a roundup of the Internet marketing conferences coming down the pike. For a comprehensive schedule of conferences throughout the year, across the globe, check out the 2014 Internet Marketing Conference Calendar, brought to you by Bruce Clay, Inc.

Internet marketers and community managers working in home and lifestyle markets won't want to miss IR Focus: NY Now Feb. 1-6 in New York City. Sessions at this conference are dedicated to expanding online expertise and managing online growth in this niche. #IRCE

Feb. 4-6, SEOToolSet Training comes to India. Bruce Clay will teach the course packed full of fundamental SEO strategies based on nearly twenty years of tried and true tactics. If you're a marketer, IT professional, site owner or anyone responsible for organic traffic, you can't afford to miss this training at The Bristol Hotel in Gurgaon, India.

Las Vegas will be buzzing with social media marketers and community managers when the Social Media Strategies Summit gets underway Feb. 4-6. Learn how GoDaddy rebranded itself, how to simplify social media analytics reporting and much more. #SMSsummit

SMX West comes to San Jose March 11-13. As an SMX training partner, Bruce Clay will host a special one-day SEO Training on March 10. If you haven't signed up for SMX West yet, use the Bruce Clay, Inc. discount code for any workshop or pass: BRUCECLAYSMXW14.

Attaboys

Football teams are not the only ones battling it out during the Super Bowl — there's also the battle of the hashtags. Marketing Land will host the third annual #HashtagBowl, wherein marketing experts will take a deep dive into all the social media plays among advertisers during the Super Bowl, complete with liveblog coverage.

Congratulations to Siddharth Lal, managing director, Bruce Clay India, for being named among the "25 Most Talented Social Media Professionals of India" by CMO Asia and Global Youth Marketing Summit. The honorees were elected by a jury of India's senior leaders, researchers and academics with criteria related to approach to digital strategy, performance management, customer focus, track record, future orientation, strategic perspective and vision.

Webmasters can now check their sites for problems specific to smartphone devices, thanks to a new feature added to the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and ClickZ created this infographic that visualizes data from their 2013 Salary Survey results. Moz released a visual display of its 2014 Industry Survey results as well.

Apple celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh home computer this month, a revolution of modern life hard to overstate.

Word on the Wire

The deadline to submit your best work for the Web Marketing Association's twelfth annual Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards is Jan. 31, 2014. This international competition looks at online advertising across 86 industry categories.

This month Matt Cutts called foul on guest blogging, labeling it an overused tactic among "low-quality, spammy sites." On his personal blog, Cutts wrote "Given how spammy it’s become, I’d expect Google’s webspam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward." Cutts recommended that Internet marketers not rely on guest blogging as a link building strategy and, furthermore, only accept guest blog posts from individuals they would personally vouch for.

Searches done on Yahoo! will now go through a secure server by default, a change that will be rolled out by March 31. Referrer data from most visits from Yahoo! search will now appear as direct site traffic, although advertisers will see search referrer data.

This month, Marissa Mayer introduced Yahoo Advertising. This new platform, similar to Google's and Bing's advertising networks, will allow users to purchase ads across all Yahoo platforms, including Tumblr.

In December, Google introduced +Post ads. +Post ads display within Google+. Toyota, RITZ and Cadbury are among the brands with +Post ads.

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